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Monday, June 19, 2017

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, and the Poor People of Yesterday and Today

David Bellos has written an engaging tale of Victor Hugo
and his struggles involved in bringing his classic tale Les Misérables to fruition: The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables. His book was found interesting on at least
two levels. The first involves the
enormous popularity of Hugo and his novel, in spite of its 1,500 page
length. The second is associated with
the attitudes of the non-poor towards the poor that existed in Hugo’s era. While the poor are treated better today than
in that earlier time, it is not clear that prejudicial views of those living in
poverty have changed all that much—especially in the United States. Here we will focus on the people referred to
as Les Misérables, and how they were treated then and how they are treated
now.

Victor Hugo was born in 1802 and reached the age of
eighty-three before passing on. He was a
precocious youth who was well known for his writings that included prose,
poetry, and plays. At the age of
twenty-nine he published the enormously popular Notre Dame de Paris, better known as “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Based on that success, he was given a
contract for another book which would eventually become Les Misérables. However, other literary and political
diversions intervened and Hugo only began writing that novel in 1845. An incomplete first draft was soon assembled,
but it had to be put aside as political tumult and Hugo’s participation in it
kept him busy—eventually forced him into exile.
He would settle into a house in St Peter Port on the island of Guernsey
in 1855 where he would begin anew his masterpiece which was finally published
in 1862.

The classic tale of the ex-convict Jean Valjean, who
attempts to live a good life after release from prison, and the overly zealous
inspector Javert who hounds him becomes less banal and more compelling when
viewed from a nineteenth century perspective.
The book’s title refers those who are poor and the lives they led in
Hugo’s time. Bellos provides some
background to Hugo’s tale.

“In the 1840s, France was a
constitutional monarchy with a legislative body elected by male taxpayers alone….taxes
were levied exclusively on property, and every voter was therefore an owner of
a building or of land. The charge of a
government responsible to an assembly representing the well-off defined in this
way was to maintain order among those less privileged than the voters it
served. That’s to say, improving the
lives of the ragged masses was of interest only if it helped to head off civil
strife.”

“The Paris poor were an edgy
crowd, always on the brink of disturbing the peace. What caused the common people to be
disorderly so often? Were they idle by nature? Irremediably bad? Was poverty the cause of their frightening
behavior, or was their behavior the reason they stayed poor.”

England and France were the dominant economic and
intellectual powers at the time. While
they did not agree on much else, both nations concluded that their abundant
stocks of poor people were to be feared and controlled rather than pitied and
aided. Poverty breeds crime and crime
must be suppressed.

Consider this quote from the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert.

“Few souls are strong enough not
to be laid low and eventually debased by poverty. Common folk are unbelievably stupid. I do not know what magical illusion makes
them blind to their current poverty and to the even greater poverty that awaits
them in old age. Poverty is the mother
of great crimes; sovereigns are responsible for making people misérable and it is they
who will be judged in this world and the next for the crimes that poverty
commits.”

This view at least recognizes that the state has some
responsibility for the crime that arises from the poor masses. A more cynical view—and one more influential—emerged
from the theorizing of the Englishman Robert Malthus.

“Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798 but
read for many decades after that, claims that, absent the benefits of education
and refinement, human beings are naturally idle and can be roused to productive
labour only by a pressing need. Its
second premise is that the uneducated and unrefined always take the easiest
path. Given the opportunity, poor people
steal what they need instead of working to acquire it. In Malthus’s dim view of human nature, the
poor constitute a different species.”

“….even people who were not
convinced of Malthus’s grim analysis of the unequal race between population and
the land’s capacity to feed it took it for granted that crime and poverty were
two sides of the same coin. The ‘lower
classes’ were most often seen as ‘dangerous classes’ in England and in France.”

Both countries had formulated policies for dealing with
the poor, none of which could be considered enlightened. There was a tendency to divide the poor into
two classes, one which consisted of those that misfortune had rendered
incapable of work, and those who could work but were not earning enough to
survive on. England had a long tradition
of “poor laws” that required parish councils to provide some level of
sustenance to the sick, orphaned, or disabled.
This definition of the needy gradually expanded to include the low- or
non-income poor. This trend redefined
the meaning of the word poor or misérables
to that as understood in Hugo’s time.
This change also generated considerable resistance to this expansion by
conservative elements.

“The gradual but fundamental
shift in meaning from ‘laid low by ill fortune’ to ‘short of money’ ran into a
wall of resistance from entrenched economic, moral and political positions, and
it took a century and more for them to be overcome. Les Misérables
was a key element in the history of that long drawn out change.”

England generally out performed France economically, but
that also meant that it was also more proficient in creating poor people. Conservative elements won the debate as to
how to deal with those suffering from poverty.
The result was a new and most cruel version of a “Poor Law” in which
those capable of work would receive no benefits at all and the remainder would
be incarcerated in poor houses or workhouses.

“The out-turn of the political
debate was not simple abolition, however, but a new kind of Poor Law that drove
a wedge between people who didn’t have enough money to live on—the poor, in the
modern sense of the word—and paupers,
who were to be removed from public sight.
Income support for the underpaid was indeed abolished, but so was direct
payment to the ‘victims of misfortune’, who were to be cared for in
institutions called poor houses or workhouses. These were designed to be as unpleasant as
possible. The rationale behind the
considerable expense of constructing them was to provide a standard of living
lower than any that could be had from work: the workhouse should never tempt
the able bodied to abandon toil, however pitiful the wages of honest labour
came to be. So horrible and humiliating
were they that some indigents, like Mrs Higden in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, preferred to die on
the road rather than enter the doors of a poor house for their last days.”

Bellos suggests that these poor houses where derived from
a policy instituted in France by Napoleon.

“The idea came from the dépôts
de mendicité (beggars’ repositories), prison-like
dormitories set up by Napoleon in 1808 to put vagrants, beggars, lunatics and
the disabled out of public sight. The
scheme may have had a cosmetic effect in town centres, but it made no impact on
the number of indigents and beggars in France.”

When Hugo began work on his novel in the 1840s, the
French system of dépôts
had mostly disappeared, while the English system of poor houses had continued
to spread to where almost every town had one.
France had no policy for dealing with the poor and England had one that
was horrible. Hugo saw the necessity of
a social revolution and he wanted to use his novel to encourage it. This revolution was intended to extend well
beyond France as Hugo and his associates geared up to produce the quickest and
broadest distribution of any book in history—one that would be translated into
many languages and be read and appreciated worldwide—justifying Bellos’s appellation
: ”The Novel of the Century.”

What he wished to accomplish was to create the perception
that there was no fundamental difference between the poor and the wealthy other
than circumstance. His novel would
produce the immensely sympathetic character of Jean Valjean who struggles
mightily with the obstacles placed in his path yet manages to live a good life. Hugo also creates the villainous Thénardier to balance
Valjean’s goodness with his evil. People
do respond to poverty by turning to
crime, just as those with immense wealth have demonstrated the capability to
commit immense crimes. And then there is
Javert whose behavior is least easily understood by the modern reader. He plays the symbolic role of society in
general which refuses to recognize that an ex-con like Valjean can be a good man. His logically awkward suicide symbolizes the
need to render extinct the notion that there is a class separation between
human beings.

“Javert’s limited vision of the
social sphere is both a product and a pillar of the society he strives to
uphold. For him, there are two and only
two kinds of person, the well-to-do and the ne’er-do-well. Javert sees these classes as fundamentally
incompatible, and his job is to keep them apart.”

“Javert’s too-simple
understanding of duty is contradicted by the noble behavior of Valjean, who
lets the police spy go free rather than shooting him dead. A member of the underclass behaving with
generosity shatters Javert’s view of the world.
Unable to grasp how he could reconcile himself to the existence of a man
whose actions have turned his world upside down, he throws himself into the
Seine. In this late stage in the
narrative of Les Misérables,
psychological plausibility is less vital than the symbolic meaning of the act:
those who refuse reconciliation between social classes in the name of law and
order are swept away. Moral progress
cannot be realized as long as Javert’s two-part vision of humanity persists.”

How successful was Hugo in initiating social change? Bellos provides us with a short list of what
policies were most important to Hugo.

“Allow offenders to reenter
society after they have done their time.
For example, abolish the ‘yellow passport’ that makes it so difficult
for Valjean to find food lodging and work in 1815.”

“Amend the penal code, so that
justice might be tempered with mercy.
For example, do not send poor peasants to do hard labor because they
steal bread to feed children.”

“Build schools for the poor and
make elementary education universal and obligatory. (This is the one policy that is proposed in
eloquent and strident terms; it was also put into effect in Hugo’s lifetime by
the ‘Jules Ferry Law’, passed in 1877.)

Bellos suggests that Hugo’s vision essentially came to
pass and Les Misérables
had much to do with it.

“These four aims don’t add up to
a ‘politics’, but they do lay out a pathway we can easily agree to be right
because all these measures have been put into practice by governments of the
left and right over the past 150 years. We
should not dismiss Hugo’s blustering confidence in the future improvement of
society. Nor should we underestimate the
degree to which Les Misérables
encouraged and maybe even accelerated its coming about.”

Given the immense and lasting popularity of Hugo’s tale,
it would be difficult to argue with the conclusion that it had a role in
tempering society’s attitudes and diminishing its divisions. However, what is most striking about this
Bellos’s narrative about social change and the betterment of mankind, is that
the four policy thrusts encouraged by Hugo and the notion that the poor are not
a different class than the non-poor are all currently under renewed attack in the
United States.

The Tea Party version of the Republican Party, the one
which controls congress and the presidency, has been explicit in dividing the
country into “makers” and “takers.” This
is a small variation in meaning from Malthus’s description of the differences
between the poor and the non-poor.

If one marches down Bellos’s list of Hugo’s four policy
requests, one discovers that they are no longer firmly established and the
Republican Party is in the process of weakening the protections in all
cases. An ex-con like Valjean would be
little better treated in our country today than he was in Hugo’s France. Parole constraints and limitations on the
rights of ex-cons to vote and receive public benefits are common across the
nation, and employers continue to avoid dealings with those with a criminal
record. If one wishes to encounter mercy
in our legal system it is to be found in our urban areas where crime rates are
high but conviction rates are low. In
the rural areas controlled by Republicans the crime rates are low but
vindictiveness leads to high conviction rates.
There has never been an explicit job creation program since the era of
the Great Depression. Rather, the economic
goal of the Republican Party is to keep wages low rather than encourage wage
income to rise. Tax policy is focused on
benefiting the already wealthy, with future transfers intended to flow from the
poor to the rich. Republican governors
have come to view a college education not as a right but as a privilege—one to
be enjoyed by the people who can already afford it. Similarly, universal education at the K-12
level has long been under attack in the name of “parental choice.” The goal is to take funds from public
education and use them to subsidize private education—a process that will not
end well for the poor.

And it was a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who, to
his everlasting shame, changed our welfare policy from one in which all people
have a right to some minimal level of support to one in which only those who
work can expect to receive help from society.
This is probably the most regressive welfare legislation since the
English began establishing those notorious poor houses.

Europe has better learned the lessons taught by Victor
Hugo. Meanwhile, the United States
drifts backwards, trying to recreate the nineteenth century.

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About Me

Hi, my name is Rich Couch. I spent my first career as a physical scientist. Now that I am retired I have chosen to go in another direction. I have had a lifelong love of books and an urge to write. Since I am not a story teller and I am way too old to start a new career I have found an outlet in writing essays combining reviews and my opinions of books and articles on politics and current affairs. My hope is that others will find what I have produced interesting and informative--and well written.